Trevor Kaufman of design haus Schematic passed along this shiny, produced video showing off their new “Touchwall” project that’s the sequel to a previous multitouch panel they built. As it happens, we’re the first to get a look at it.

Multitouch is in a weird spot. It’s in our phones. It’s in big projects like the Touchwall. But it’s not in our home machines yet (for the most part, excepting Tablet PC users and a few HP and Asus customers). So kinks are still there for the working out, and that’s a lot of what Schematic has been working on.

For instance, how do you type in a username and password on a big public wall? For Touchwall, you don’t—you swipe an RFID badge on the screen.

What about letting multiple users access the system at once? Schematic solved that problem by letting that be possible.

Because Schematic is a design and special projects group, they aren’t shy to crow about their fancy acheivents. (Kaufman said we should think of the Touchwall “not as a standalone device, but as a new technology paradigm”, which implies a unique technical challenge: What does the Touchwall do when you get sick all over it?) But these are really interesting problems they’re solving, and if these sort of interfaces really are the public access terminals of our future airports and Cinnabons, I look forward to greasing them up.

I think is cool… but pretty lame, we need to guide the technology for better things in the future (Medicine,weather,food grow) This wall is just a fancy way to hipnotize people to see in how many ways they can full the pockets of the designers.

Cool but no wonderful. Keep working hard maybe in the future I create something less useless.

The money sound bite comes at 2:55, when one of the product planners references the ubiquitous and obnoxious personalized advertising from ‘Minority Report’ — and he thinks it’s a GOOD THING to be emulating.

I know satire is hard to catch sometimes, so let me spell it out: You, sir, are missing the point.

I’m fine with targeted messages so long as I have control over how much information I give you. But using your brand to constantly interrupt my day is an excellent way to make me hate your brand.

Pretty lame. I would prefer all of these functions on a mobile phone. People will use this for a couple of minutes because it is shiny. But then they will get a headache, their arms will get tired, and they’ll move onto something else.

So are you guys using tbeta/ccv for tracking or was that just a few second acknowledgment to the open source multi-touch world? Great wall, but you video makes it seem like you created all the software yourself, which you most certainly did not do if you are using that tracker.

I think you missed the point too. He doesn’t want the thing to be intrusive, just attractive. They want you to see the device and go “hey, that’s something I can use” much like an ATM. Usability was the underlying theme I picked up on.